I didn't expect this to such a difficult read because of its genre. I wasn't prepared for it. By the end of the story, I wore a grimace. It's not the matter of a child's probable suicide, but it's also the matter of philosophy and doing life as is. This is Joshua Ferris's 'The Boy Upstairs' published in The New Yorker on May 30, 2022.
She received news that an old friend, Anna's child had apparently died by suicide. This was told to her by another friend, who heard it from someone else and didn't actually know if it indeed took place. Nobody seemed to have verified it, and the protagonist didn't reach out to Anna either, for various reasons of estrangement.
She had always wondered if Anna, who had been a good friend for many years, had withdrawn because she had wearied of her insistence on acknowledging the shit of life, that set of facts which would deter a thinking person from recommending it to others. Anna’s own disposition was very different. She rode horses. She owned a china cabinet. Her diet consisted mostly of leafy greens. She spent her summers on the coast of Maine and was married to a man who sold imported fabrics. The closest she and Anna came to having it out was when Anna said to her, “You’ve given up.” She knew that to be both broadly true and wholly inaccurate. It was not lost on her that Anna had been pregnant when she began to distance herself—had withdrawn from her to protect the child who had, apparently, now taken his own life.
Then she got abruptly terminated from her teaching job at university. She was there for nine semesters, and then this happened. Readers were privy to the conversation between her and the chair of her faculty. She was fired for two counts of inappropriate behavior towards students.
On that same day, she seemed to also have gone to a cafe in the morning and walked off without paying for her coffee, again. She had done that for fifty coffees, and the cafe had the CCTV footage as evidence. She had eight credit cards, which were busted, except for one that had almost reached its limit.
The name didn’t ring a bell. Was it any wonder? The paper was perfectly unmemorable. But the handwritten notes along the margins were hers. Where a different professor might have voiced encouragement (“Promising idea”) or demanded more rigor (“Your logic is iffy”), she had written “Fuck off” no fewer than nineteen times along the snowy-white fringes of Adam Carter’s eight inept pages.
.....................
“More importantly,” he said, and to her surprise handed her the iPad that had been sitting on a stack of papers on his desk. The browser was open to Facebook. “Are these photos of you with a student?”
This was the day that the protagonist's life unraveled. Every thing came to a head. Her husband left her a voicemail to announce his intention to begin divorce proceedings. He also had managed to get home before she did, packed his stuff and left. He took the chairs, and the dog.
The voice mail awaiting her when she returned to the car was from her husband. He wasn’t sure which to discuss first: the tweets, the photographs circulating on Facebook, the direct message from Chad’s wife, or the voice mail he had received from the Kingston police inquiring into her whereabouts. All together they served to shake him out of his stupor, and he announced that he would be initiating divorce proceedings while staying at his cousin’s, in Rhinebeck.
The ending explained all about the title. The protagonist had imagined Nicky to be possibly alive, and oddly, in her house, upstairs. I was like.... HOW. How did her brain reach that juncture? Is this the point she completely loses her grasp on reality?
She reaches the top of the stairs. The door is closed to the room from which the faint scrabbling is coming. She knows in her mind that she will soon be mauled by a rodent, or clobbered by a maniac, or locked in a passionate embrace the minute she releases her dear dog from confinement. But it is Nicky she wants, Nicky she hopes to find. The possibility of Nicky would redeem her crimes, restore whole worlds that have fallen away.
In an interview with the magazine's Willing Davidson, the author talks about how his messy protagonist is pretty much, all of us. We've all been there, and for some of us, a few times, a fine mess.
In the midst of all this tragedy, the story is also quite funny—it achieves genuine surprise through some calculated misdirection. How do you go about that, technically? In other words, how do you calibrate the spooling out of information and misinformation, and how do you make sure you’ve achieved the correct balance?
Plot and character work at cross-purposes in a story like this one. So there’s the character, a philosopher with high ideals, and then there’s the plot—a woman’s life quickly unravels. That the unravelling happens to the high idealist automatically sets up the misdirection. The voice is another element—through the voice you get the character. Though she might be something of a complainer, her complaints are at a high level and pretty relatable, so you’d never really guess at all the many ways that she’s participating in the degraded world until the plot kicks in. I paid attention first to that voice/character, to establish certain standards, then to the rapidly unfolding plot, which undid those standards, until I arrived at the moral reckoning and the possibility of a metaphysical revelation that I always had in mind.
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